Only 25 Percent of Occupations In US Are At 'High Risk' For Losing Jobs From Automation, Study Finds

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz: Automation is coming, but not for everyone. Researchers at the Brookings Institution estimate just 25% of occupations in the US -- in production, food service, and transportation -- are at "high risk" for losing jobs from the advance of automation. "Automation is not the end of work," said Mark Muro, policy director for the Brookings Institution's program on urban economies and co-author of a study published Jan. 24. Most occupations will see specific tasks assumed by machines, but much of their labor will likely be enhanced, rather than fully replaced, through automation, the study found. That's because automation rarely replaces entire jobs, but instead handles specific tasks in occupations that often require hundreds of them.

To forecast the effects, Brookings researchers looked at thousands of specific tasks within each occupation, and the degree to which automation could handle them, coming up with a risk rating for each occupation. The workers most vulnerable are in transportation, production, food preparation, and office administration, which, combined, make up about 36 million jobs, or 25% of the total jobs in the US today. In these occupations, roughly 70% of tasks were considered routine and predictable, prime targets to be managed by machines. The most vulnerable were "packaging and filling machine operators" (100% exposure to automation), food preparation workers (91%), payroll and timekeeping clerks (87%), and light-truck and delivery drivers (78%).

Comments

Only?

[rsilvergun]

WTF? Seriously, what the actual fuck. Do you have any idea what losing 25% of the jobs effectively overnight (that's what "at risk" implies) means? We're a winner take all, if you don't eat you don't work society.

Those people aren't going to go quietly into the good night. Forget violence, a lot will start gunning for _your_ job. It'll be a race to the bottom like you've never seen before where the only winners will be the ones that own the robots pitting us against each other for their profit and amusement. You'll be lucky to make min-wage with a 4 year degree there'll be so many desperate workers.

There's a reason I can get a competent programmer in India for $30k/yr instead of $120k/yr, there's too damn many of them. If you don't want your standard of living to go to hell now's the time to do something about it. And no, buying lottery tickets or hoping your gonna get rich off your MCSE doesn't count.

Re:Only?

[tsqr]

It's 25% of occupations, not 25% of jobs.

Re:Only?

[_Sharp'r_]

Virtually 100% of the carriage making industry has been lost. There were 13,000 of those businesses in 1890, now they're pretty much all defunct. There's almost nobody who hand spins thread for a living anymore, either. That used to employ vast numbers of people, mostly across the South.

Fortunately, there is literally no limit to the amount of work available for people to do, just a lack of people to be available to do it. Specific jobs have been being destroyed by automation for hundreds of years. Yes, the process has accelerated recently. Guess what, it hasn't had a noticeable effect on unemployment rates, rather it leads to increased wages over time as increased productivity as a result of more capital (automation) being able to be used by people to accomplish more.

No, this time won't be different. The luddite fallacy remains a fallacy.

Re:Only?

[Aighearach]

If one missing comma makes it that hard for you to understand, maybe you should just turn off the computer, get another drink, and watch some teevee.

Re:Only?

[Aighearach]

Bourgeois are the tradespeople who own their own tools. The canonical example would be the cobbler (shoemaker) who owns his own shop and lives upstairs.

This is why you commies always fuck shit up so bad; you can't even figure out that it is the factory owner who shits on the factory worker! You're too busy hating on people doing things for themselves to even notice the causes of your own suffering.

My advice: be less jealous, and more greedy.

Re:Only?

[satsuke]

That's a false equivelancy because in your example, those jobs that were displaced were recreated doing something else in a similar field.

With automation, those jobs are gone .. poof .. no similar spot to take its place.

In an ideal world, everyone else would just work less hours, but that won't get around the reality of it being easier to push the remaining people harder than it is to lessen their load at the bosses expense.

Re: Only?

[Monster_user]

Increased wages over time? When you have pressure from automation reducing the demand for labor and procreation increasing the supply of labor, it is hard to see how supply and demand would increase the value of labor.

Automation frees up limited resources to improve profits for an increasingly smaller number. The value of automation is seen by the wealthy more so than the poor. For the poor it is an added expense, an additional pressure towards a minimum level of capacity to be competitive and remain employed. Because there is a sufficient supply of optimal labor, inefficient sub-optimal labor is unnecessary. Inefficient sub-optimal labor has a lower return on investment, if it has one at all, and thus has no economic incentive to fund the life towards automation and optimization.

How much does it cost to automate your home? To replace appliances and devices with more energy efficient alternatives? To install double-paned or other more moder window types? To replace a vehicle with an energy efficient alternative, or one with greater capacity and accident mitigation technology to reduce the risk of damage. Can one afford to live within a city on the income provided by said city?

We are raising the cost of entry while simultaneously lowering the return on investment.

An Alaskan said it best when he said that he feels sorry for those of us on the mainland, because Alaskans can live off the land.

Re:Only?

[Durrik]

This is the problem my company faces. I also wish they didn't see $30 k in India as luxury wages. There's plenty of competent people in India, but they're competent enough to know that they can get much more than $30 k, or the peanuts my company pays.
The cheapness of my company is also the reason why my job isn't at risk of automation, they look to save money for this quarter, and will never make the up front investment to automate my job. Ship it off to India if they can, but automate it? No.
I also write the build and test automation software as one of my many hats, and I do my best to automate my job so they keep giving me more jobs that I automate. Fortunately its positioned us to get into industries that require a lot of certifications on code quality and process and that means much more work so in a way I'm creating employment by automating the stuff I am.

Billionaires and Investment Capitalists

[WillAffleckUW]

Unfortunately, 100 percent of occupations held by billionaires and investment capitalists are subject to automation, but they could always retrain as guillotine blade sharpeners and other useful occupations, if need be.

Re:actually 100%

[h33t l4x0r]

Says the lucky guy with only one job.

Re:Now the hard question.

[h33t l4x0r]

We could limit legal immigration, stop illegal immigration..

Can you explain why you're worried about immigrants taking your jobs, but fine with robots taking them?
What's your position on immigrant robots?

Re:Now the hard question.

[Gravis Zero]

There are other options. We could limit legal immigration, stop illegal immigration, and retrain the workers.

Sorry but that wouldn't even help help because of the very short time period on which automation will wipe out a sector. As for retraining workers, what do you think training millions of people to do various trades is going to do to the wages of each trade?

Also, if we're supplying people with state-funded training then why aren't we supplying state-funded college education?

Any way it goes, they are the "welfare queen"s that they despise... they just don't know it.

I've said this before

[rsilvergun]

but I wish I could stop saying it: the Luddites were real people put out of work by technology in a society where if you don't work you don't eat.

It took a _long_ time for technology to catch up. The Luddites died jobless. Their kids did too. There were decades of unemployment and social strife following the industrial revolution until the two greatest employment programs in history restored full employment.

The tech that came out of the war (and the mad rush to rebuild the world) kept us going for this long. But the rich don't want another World War. It's their stuff, why would they let us break it? I remember when Pakistan looked the other way when some of their folks attacked India's capital. I was ready for WWIII. Didn't happen. India sucked it down because it would have been bad for business.

This means we're not gonna have wars save us this time. The next industrial revolution is upon us in the form of computerized automation. I've never _once_ heard a credible explanation of exactly what jobs we're all gonna retrain for. That's because there isn't one. You say that it's just that I can't imagine those jobs? That's because by the time they're available I'll be dead and I'll have died dirt poor.

It doesn't have to be that way. We can learn from history for a change. We know technology unemployment is coming. Now's the time to do something about it while we still have some economic power.

Re:Now the hard question.

[h33t l4x0r]

Most immigrants are hard-working folks who just want a chance to provide for their families. And you didn't exactly come over on the Mayflower, pal.

Re:Now the hard question.

[Anonymous Coward]

Immigration is one of the biggest drivers of economic growth. Every capitalist knows this. Here's a short writeup at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative thinktank: http://www.aei.org/publication/how-immigration-boosts-american-economic-growth-and-innovation/